Saturday, June 18, 2005

You may be right; I may be crazy.

"The market is riding a wave of sentiment," said Tim Evans, senior energy analysts at IFR Markets. "Actual production is rising, inventories are higher, even the build in distillates is 800,000 higher than last year, so where is the shortage?"

According to Evans, some of the oil price hike is based on chatter about "peak oil," a theory that world oil reserves have reached their peak and will gradually decline until the world eventually runs out of it completely.

Evans applied a calculation to data from BP's (BP:NYSE - commentary - research) latest annual statistical review of world oil, showing that in 1980, there were 29.5-years worth of oil reserves at that year's consumption rate, while in 2004, there were 40-years worth of oil reserves at 2004 consumption rates.

In 1980, world oil reserves were estimated at 667.1 billion barrels, while in 2004 estimates show 1.18 trillion barrels are still in the ground, BP's report shows.

"There is no evidence that the exhaustion of resources is imminent," Evans said. In fact, recovery rates keep growing as sophisticated technologies have made more of the globe's surface accessible, such as deepwater drilling in the outer continental shelf.

P.S. Tim Evans of IFR Markets has been consistently wrong. That makes him the guy to watch: